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Fried food is often loved from afar these days — it’s so delicious but so bad for you. If you’re trying to stay healthy, one of the first things to go is anything that has been fried.

But Norman King, a registered dietician, is here to stand up for frying. His new book with Southern Living, The Way to Fry, is filled with fried food of all kinds, including many alternate ways of frying in order to keep the calories and fat content down. "When I sat down and looked at it critically I found out that its not as bad as we all think it is," he says. "So we’ve got things like, if you take a drumstick and a fried chicken wing it has the same amount of calories and fat as four commercial 2 1/4-inch chocolate chip cookies... [But] the key thing to frying is the crust, and that’s that crunchy, golden delicious taste that people have. And doing that without a lot of oil takes a lot of science and know-how. So we use the oven primarily for our high temperature and then we’re spraying the food directly with oil. And how we help out with some more crunch and flavor is with the coating. So we’re using crackers and different types of breading and some other options that we can kind of manipulate so that we don’t have to cook them as long and use as much oil."

For more from King, including what items just don’t work as a healthy option, watch the video above or pick up his book The Way to Fry.